on how to be remembered

‘ Leave no trace’ the Buddhists said

One day, you will sink like a smooth pebble into a bottle green swamp, your earthly time no more than a frog plip-plippling its way across the lilied surface, or the ‘phook’ sound of deer mashing through black bottom pond pulp. 

But you think you are more than simple ecology, think of those wild Buffalo gals, the honky tonk women, blowing noses and blowing minds. Ruffled petticoats ruffling straight women’s feathers and sawing away at human decency. Tearing up history like jangled piano notes, stubby callous fingers plonking minor keys and shooting out sharp sounds into the plains night-sky, soot stained boots kicking dirt, dancing by the light of the moon.

  I could be like that, a sour memory like cheap perfume, tarnished but buxom, bawdy. 

a collection of impressions, flat as a cut out of Annie Oakley where you put the head through the hole. These are not real bodies, real histories, real deaths. Not like yours at all.  

   

You’ll be in tune with Great Spirit, The Oldest One, who, despite your modern living, matching IKEA chrome toothbrush holders, frequent bids for attention on social media and single use açai smoothie consumption, Ancestor Spirit is still on your contact list. Spirit will have kept track of the time you lived authentically, the first part of your life, a backyard warrior, ruler of beetles and earth moving serpents. Standing on top of your sandbox podium, belting an ode to the fiery orange hewn maple leaves overhead, autumn sun slicing over the freeway and bathing the city lot, your own natural Kingdom, in the last days of heat of that year.  You prized your days in the sun, cattails and field mouse homes the only treasures worth seeking. Perhaps you’ll trot into the next life like a wolf, yellow eyes melting into a horizon of gold. 

  ‘She was real. So real. Ran with the wolves..’ , they’ll say.

Or perhaps, when it’s your time, you can climb into one of those large trees, so old the heart has rotted out. For that’s what you’ll do, your heart will rust, oxygenated like an old tin roof, exposed to time and pollution. Curled up and cozy, soft wet nose tucked into soft brown fur. 

All the legends that spoke to you, and only to you, who reached through time to cradle you with their scope and magnitude, leaving traceable footprints in your imagination.. haven’t taught you a thing about solitude. For here you are, sharing it, inviting anyone into your fortress among the oaks. 

 So did they.

As will you,